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According to Scribd, "Scribd is the world's largest social reading and publishing company. " Scribd has over 75 million readers each month making it "the largest book club".

If you are looking for standards you need to reference in projects, these are the ones that were published in 2013 with the idea they would be appropriate for any state.

According to the Texas Education Government Agency (https://tea.texas.gov/Academics/Instructional_Materials/Accessible_Instructional_Materials/), this website "serves as a resource to state and district-level educators, parents, publishers, conversion houses, accessible media producers, and others interested in learning more about accessible educational materials and the National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard (NIMAS)."

Describes the value of PLN's as well as the support it provides in learning. Ways in which educators use PLN's are identified as professional development, resource sharing, mentoring, technology integration strategies.

This provides some simple reasons to develop a PLN. I love that it encourages busy teachers to create a PLN by letting them know that it will make their work easier! This page also includes a "how to", but the "why" part is a terrific resource on its own.

This gives you 10 reasons on how to jump start your Personal Learning Network. Great tips for a beginner like myself.

This auto-populated the title, which was kind of cool. PDF article written by Penelope Eckert & published on Stanford's site. I love this line, "Two conditions of a community of practice are crucial in the conventionalization of meaning: shared experience over time, and a commitment to shared understanding."

I like the idea that the article tries to unify these elements, because we tend to only think of Communities of Practice as being beneficial for the learner.

The article discusses the state of nursing at the time of publishing but also delves into the creation of a community of practice that included international healthcare instructors. The article also discusses challenges that were faced by the community as they transitioned from a face to face environment to an online discussion.

This article talks about the early collaboration tools that were available at the time of its publishing and their possible use in medical education. A general background is provided of blogs and podcasts and the article offers advantages and disadvantages to using both.

This article highlighted the different roles in constructivist theory and also helped me to really understand the role that knowledge takes in constructivist theory. It is described as a combination of ever changing experiences and information that provide a foundation for new experiences and knowledge. It also introduces PLNs as an open space that allows for intercepting and spreading competencies and skills by publishing, combining and correlating resources.

This is a link to the Word file of the dissertation of Etienne Wenger. In his abstract, he states," It is an attempt to open up a universe of discourse about learning that does justice to the social character of human life." The dissertation let to the eventual book that he published, "Communities of Practice." Wengers dissertations deals more with issues of transparency, while the book pursues the CoP theory. This dissertation supports the udea of visible artifacts being part of CoPs. This was written in 1990, so was before the advent of social networking as we know it, but comes from a social perspective that correlates to what we consider social networking today.

This downloadable handbook contains background articles and suggested practices on how to best engage families in their children's education. It was published in 2011 with funding and support from the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Elementary and Secondary Education to the Academic Development Institute and the Center on Innovation & Improvement.

easily create and distribute a professional-looking multimedia newsletter

I found the Nielson report cited in several of the articles I reviewed and decided to check it out. The Nielson report typically cites was published in 2009 and so instead I retrieved a more recent (2011) report on the state of social media. This is a fascinating graphic display of the synthesis and major findings of research on the use of social media both in the United States and globally. This is important as we consider the needs and possibilities of using the connected learning theories reviewed in our reading. The data gathered reflects a continued rise in access of social networks and blogs across a wide variety of demographics. Information such as 4 out of 5 active Internet users now visit SN and blogs cannot be ignored as we consider the impact this has on instructional design and education technology applications.

In this article that focuses on social networking and learning, Ruth Reynard explores research conducted by The National School Boards Association (USA), in partnership with research firm Grunwald Associates and with the support of Microsoft, Newscorp, and Verizon, published a 2007. The research cited indicates that learning through social networks is mostly "unidirectional (posting messages, downloading media files, updating personal information) and students utilize it as "a self-reflective learning environment." However, the author points out that the researchers also found if instructional design is geared toward "the user controlling the tool rather than the tool dictating the user's activity," learning collaboratively can increase knowledge because the learner becomes actively engaged in the task, rather than passively approaching it.

I really like the message where it says that students become more actively engaged when they control the tool rather than the tool dictating the user's activity. The students then take control of their learning. They map the course they want to take.

this was very interesting - I found myself wondering how much of it was still relevant given its "age." Crazy that 2008 is "old" but social media has changed so much since then!

http://arxiv.org/ is a social networking site that is hosted by Cornell University Library. It is used to share working papers and to actually publish academic papers. It is widely used in the quantitative sciences and is beginning to displace actual journals.

Magazines from different countries and in different languages

While not based on technology, the article by Mark Granovetter published in 1973 looks at social networks where diffusion of information is not based on strong ties but rather weak ties. The paper suggests that information is diffused further through the strength of a person's weak ties. We may see this also through social media.

Thought piece by Dr. Lisa Dawley published in 2009 in On The Horizon. This publication dealt with social learning in the virtual world Second Life but can be applied on other online learning communities. What is especially useful is the social network knowledge construction matrix that cover five degrees of involvement in the learning community. These levels are identifying the network, lurking, contributing, creating and leading.